Like this:

My new blanket, sea green, provides comfort against the squalls of the world. Wrapped in soft waves of blended cotton, I am hard to convince. Maybe it’s the celebrity twitter fiascos and heat waves, the political conventions. Maybe it’s the people who let me down. Maybe it’s the many gods, the guns, exploitation and fear. Maybe it’s my great expectations. Endorsements bought and traded and ringing in the ears, racial tensions expansive in the cities in the nights. How we go about reaching out for our implosives. Some of us are down on our luck.

I am up on my luck and not scared to get close to someone in need. Outside of car troubles, empty wallets, degradations, and syncope spells… loneliness awaits the life of living on couches in cars on corners. Nobody should ever feel left completely alone. If all I can offer is my company, kind words and home cooking, this is what I shall give. No one oughta feel no one cares.

I pray that you will make it and come back to us like Spring. For now I fall back to my routine, preservation of sanity, and settle down to read of the exploits of pioneers attempting to cross the Sierra Nevadas two hundred years ago to reach our sacred, sweet valley. Thank god for family and community, and cheap, blended cottons. I had just enough fight in me, in Walmart, to open mom’s palette beyond earth tones.

Like this:

Paris is incredible. Incroyable. Very possibly the most treasured city in the world, though I hate to use superlatives. Have you been there? You will understand the origin of the café and people will talk back to you, tell you how they really feel, argue with you, almost fight with you before you all get down to the basic human show of kindness, and share some bread crusts and cheese, water and wine, coffee and conversation. And embrace one another, locating a point of arrival – by point of departure. You gotta roll up sleeves and put forth the knuckles of convictions first, show them where you stand. Only then can you find common ground somewhere between, which often is the character behind the words and philosophies. Willingness to defend your cause and country. Loyalty. Spiritedness. Cohesion.Esprit de corps. This is the French term for the universal experience of morale. Uniting behind a common cause. And in these times of terrorism (under attack today in Nice) we need the glue only France can manufacture. Let our hearts go out to the lives lost and the lives living with the loss. We all can feel the loss and let those who we have lost inspire us to counter by coming together somehow to heal these differences because we all can agree, on ALL sides, terror and Terrorism suck.

Like this:

“I missed her somethin terrible, Kell. She let me soak right through her skin, caught in the city, and live there protected, exceeding her lung capacity inhaling, then giving me her lips and taking in the deep river of air. Segue from there. And I began to cry when I first saw through her eyes, okay, the place had been blasted apart and made a clearing, my pupils pinning and dilating, pulsing as I really got into her, how uncommon the hopeful pain, starvation and loss for so long, god, Kell, where didya come from? Where did I come from? She was right here, beside me, pressed up against my ribs, our bellies greeting through our clothes, what hips we had trying to push around, and she started to catch the tears on a fingerprint, getting closer, cupping a hand to my face and though she let me in, she was not aware how deep I was gonna go, her fingertips she took to her lips and already salt. I would make her thirsty, all feeling her dying and coming back to life and knowing now the interior of addiction and then come clean. I took a simple breath just beyond my lung capacity, made dangerous, then kissed her a hit of my madness, and came back to myself with a gasping kind of whistle. She covered her mouth and laughed. There’s something funny in all of us. I had to crouch down to the floor so blown away by the difference in her and me, and really the influence she had on me, I mean her life, as it came to me in flashbacks, and she crouched down beside me wondering was I gonna be okay. Hiding the smile I gave her, of me. I fell on my knees on the floor and threw my arms around her. God, you are so awfully sweet. How can you be so wonderful? Looking into the green and wandering reflective marbles of her eyes. Like you saw the swamp and survived and it made ya an emerald by its burn, ya, butterflies flew you up and outta that sewer. Catfish gasping for air and feeling for the bottom. Goddam. A million particles of mulch. The rays of the sun as though caught under ice, bounce around until smothered by the anaerobic. The fish that thrive are all muscle and gray as a country mare. So rubbery they could make for playground balls if you stitched up their mouths. Slippery when dry. All you need to know. Not many survived the swamp, but she did. My Kell. Don’t cross her. I will fuck you up. We cut our teeth on the horns of bulls. Such is why she can go emo and the world will go with her, rainclouds forming and air churning, and a foggy sadness making clarity in your head. Well, someone had crossed her, and I was about to cross them out.” – Drafted from Book#3. Ame and the TE. by KatYa